Of all the tired unforgiving exhibitions of buttery, soft-serve erotica masquerading as serious art these days, the most interesting one this season has been a small intimate affair staged in L.A.'s new Gallerie Intestin on Chung King Road.
Misleadingly titled Toward a New Feminist Aesthetic, the exhibition features work by three prominent California women artists whose perspectives though appearing to be in radical opposition are in reality predictably in synch.
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| Penelope Mishnaic, 2014 |
Penelope Mishnaic comes to her subject through a brutal autobiographical self-exhumation with powerfully inert images of raw, unappetizing intimacy. Her premise seems to originate in the assertion that orgasms, in her words, "have no practical function and are therefore best consigned away from the romantic and into the transactional."
I think it best to leave this dubious manifesto alone and move to the next artist.
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| Dahlia Danton, 2014 |
Dahlia Danton, known primarily for her highly provocative and influential online journal The Harps of Heaven, has a somewhat different take on sexuality. To Danton, romantic love in the post-feminist age is just another compartmentalized expression of empowerment that is easily relagated to the general category of prosaic inactivity. It seems that in Danton's rendering, coitus and car maintenance are of equal import and to privilege one over the other is a meek capitulation toward male dominance. The exception to this, of course, is the Sapphic trajectory to which, as a militant bisexual, she graphically advocates with her tender watercolors and less than tender published essays.
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| Shira Van Wyken |
The third artist, and probably the most interesting of the group, is Shira Van Wyken, known mostly through her one-woman theatrical productions that deal with trauma, violence and humor. She is represented in the show by a monumental video loop of female circus performers interacting with male spectators. Ultimately, I'm not exactly sure what any of it means but it is refreshingly entertaining and completely free from any heavy-handed advocacy or whining womanly claptrap.
